Breadcrumb

Communards and Other Cultural Histories

Adrian Rifkin. Edited by Steve Edwards

This collection of some 32 articles and essays by Adrian Rifkin were written over a period of forty years. It contains innovative and influential studies of the archives of art, urbanism, music and popular life in France and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arranged around a number of studies of the representation of the Paris Commune, the book also contains chapters on Edith Piaf’s role in French culture, histories of art education, opera and queer life in the city as well as analytical accounts of the commodity and cultural theory in Adorno and Benjamin. An extended introduction by Steve Edwards works over the questions of uneven time in Marxist cultural theory and the disciplinary formations that underpin many of Rifkin’s essays.

Biographical note

Adrian Rifkin was Professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, then Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University and Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths London, and is currently visiting Professor in Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Steve Edwards is Professor in the Department of Art History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of several books on art and photography; an editor of the Oxford Art Journal and of the Historical Materialism Book Series.

SECTION 2. SOCIETY, IMAGE, SOCIAL DIFFERENCE: BETWEEN THE PARIS COMMUNE, THE SALON AND THE PEOPLE
2.1 Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune (1979)
2.2 The Sex of French Politics (1983)
2.3 No Particular Thing to Mean (1983)
2.4 Well Formed Phrases (1986)
2.5 Ingres and the Academic Dictionary (1983)
2.6 Success Disavowed: The Schools of Design in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain. (An Allegory) (1988)
2.7 Murals of the Buvette de La Commune – A Pictorial Dossier

SECTION 3. PARIS AND MORE ON THE PEOPLE
3.1 Musical Moments (1987)
3.2 Parvenu Or Palimpsest: Some Tracings Of The Jew In Modern France (1995)
3.3 Il y a des mots qu’on souhaiterait plus lire (2005)
3.4 Gay Paris, Trace And Ruin (2002)
3.5 americans go home, which is more american, Paris-Texas or Paris-France? (2004)

SECTION 4 ALTERNATIVES TO THE GRANDER SCHEMAS, OR RESISTANCE TO THE CRITIQUE OF GRAND NARRATIVE AS A FORM OF GRAND NARRATIVE
4.1 A Down On The Upbeat: Adorno, Benjamin And The Jazz Question (1989)
4.2 Total Ellipsis: Zola, Benjamin And The Dialectics Of Kitsch (1996)
4.3 The Long Run Of Modernity, Or An Essay On Post-Dating (1992)
4.4 Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome, Whose London? ( 1999)
4.5 Bayreuth, World City? Or: The Provincial Village As Global Denkmal... (2011)

POSTSCRIPTS: DIFFERENT BEGINNINGS
5.1 The Paris Commune Of 1871 and the Political Print (1979)
5.2 For An Artist… (2008)
5.3 Object Lessons (2001)

Bibliography of Writings by Adrian Rifkin.
Bibliography
Index

Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing 4 times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the 'Merciless criticism of everything that exists': for us that includes Marxism itself.